Tag: kickstarter

A pixel art platformer that had a successful $75,000 Kickstarter over a year and a half ago. It was supposed to launch at the end of 2014, but the delivery has slipped by a bit due to personal issues that the developer ran into.

Updates on the Kickstarter page had been few and far between for most of the last year, and fans/backers seemed to be getting a bit worried about whether Legend of Iya was still in development.

Why are you talking about this?

While this is normally a website for showcasing indie games/art, as some of you know I source most of my games from reddit. A couple of months ago I came across an interesting game called Mystik Belle. I started researching it a bit to dig up screenshots/videos to make a post, and I noticed that the developer had also been making another game, Legend of Iya.

To make an extremely long story short; LoI ran into legal troubles and the developer was making Mystik Belle (a smaller game) in order to fund the completion of LoI. At the time, he wasn’t communicating any of this to his backers (not even that backers over $10 would be getting Mystik Belle) out of fear of the backlash due to the disappointment caused by a further delay in LoI.

When he did announce all of this information to his Kickstarter backers, along with the fact that the Legend of Iya date would be pushed, they were…actually mostly OK with it. Some of them even happy they were getting an extra game. All of the stress of the last few months over a backlash seem mostly unwarranted.

I bring all this up because I know a lot of game devs follow my blog, and I think it’s important to note how crucial it is to communicate with people supporting your development (especially when it’s monetary). A lot of people will be OK with you not delivering on time, or below par, or even completely failing, once you’ve kept them updated and been honest.

In this case, much of the initial confusion of the the backers of Legend of Iya (along with worry that it was still in development), and stressful hand-wringing by the developer, could have been avoided with an open line of communication.

The developer has promised to be better at communicating in the future, and I really hope that’s true. Everyone makes mistakes; hopefully we can all learn from them.

A quirky metroidvania adventure, that just released on Steam yesterday, with plans for Android, OUYA, and iOS.

“The game is about a young witch-in-training – Belle attempting to prevent an impending unpleasant situation at the witches’ summit by recreating a potion she is wrongfully accused of ruining.“

Mystik Belle was developed by the same person behind Legend of Iya, which had a successful 75k Kickstarter almost two years ago, but hasn’t yet been released after running into a little trouble. You can read more about that here.

I’ve been playing it for a little bit, and it’s quite fun, with lovely art and quirky dialogue (though admittedly I’m only a couple of hours in, making gifs sucks time >.<).

The dev was nice enough to give me a few Steam keys to give away, so if you’d like one, just tweet me @screenshotdaily. All gone!!

A party platformer for up to 4 cute animals players, where each has an input on how the level is designed. Between each round players are given items to modify the layout of the level with barriers and traps. Naturally, as more rounds pass the crazier the levels get. Depending on the mode, players run through individually or all at once. There’s also a single player puzzle mode.